8 April: Applying the Thumbscrews

Every race is a chance to score points. Every racer knows this, just as they know you have to score points if you want to win championships. But even the most disciplined points-hoarder knows the best way to score points is to win races... Something along those lines was probably what was crossing Jim Richards' mind as the ATCC reassembled for its fourth points-paying round, this time the tiny, winding Winton Motor Raceway in rural Victoria.

Sojourn in the South
After his victory at Phillip Island, Dick Johnson hopped on a plane to the U.S. for his latest NASCAR cameo. This time the event was the TranSouth 500 at Darlington – not the prestigious Southern 500, but a high-profile race nevertheless. Sadly (and perhaps inevitably), the Lady in Black proved too tough for Johnson to tame, qualifying only 39th out of the grid of forty. He described that as, "Reasonable, in those sort of conditions. I only had thirty laps on the track before the start of the race, because of bad weather." But then in the race, he picked up the Darlington Stripe he'd been hoping to avoid, ending his day in the wall. He was registered in 34th place, which wasn't exactly glamorous.

There was an upside, however. This was one of the races filmed for Tom Cruise vehicle Days Of Thunder, and because Dick got a blink-and-you-miss-it appearance in the final edit, the studio ended up flinging him some extra beer money.

After the release of the movie a year later I ended up getting a cheque in the mail. I had no idea why and I'm looking at this cheque going, "What the hell is this?" It was about $2,000 or something. And then I rang a few people and someone said yes, you got the cheque because you had so many seconds of footage in Days Of Thunder.

So there I was in the No.38 Redkote Thunderbird in this movie and the footage they used was from Charlotte from memory. – Dick Johnson, Dick Johnson Racing: 30-Year Anniversary

Memory mightn't serve there, Dick. I'd be very surprised if they got any footage of him at Charlotte, six weeks later, because he crashed in the Winston Open (a shootout race for drivers not eligible for the All-Star Race). Then he failed to qualify for the bigtime Coca-Cola 600 the following weekend, because the prime car was still in the shop and he had to rely on the backup. But they definitely used footage from Darlington: in the movie, at the final restart, Cole Trickle in the #46 City Lumina (actually a Hendrick car handled by R&D driver Greg Sacks) passes Johnson on the way to taking his maiden victory. It would be interesting to know exactly how much Dick was paid for how many seconds of film – the per-frame wage would be quite something, I imagine.

Amazingly, Dick's crew chief was none other than Ray Evernham, who would later be the voice in Jeff Gordon's ear through his early period of dominance. (Source)

Ironically, the real race was won by the inspiration for Rowdy Burns – the Intimidator himself, Dale Earnhardt. You can watch the full thing here, if you have three and a half hours to kill.

Johnson said of his time in NASCAR, "It was an amazing experience but at the same time it was quite taxing." It was also possibly the reason he was never destined to break Big Pete Geoghegan's record of five Australian Touring Car Championships. In such a close-run season you could point to nearly anything being the deciding factor, but there seems little doubt the distraction of this different kind of racing (not to mention the jet lag from flying there and back, and simply the time not spent working on the cars in Brisbane), took his eye off the ball at a crucial moment. And it was at this point in the championship that Jim Richards started to really apply the blowtorch.

Technically Challenged
Gibson Motorsport had never ceased developing the Skyline. While it would be a stretch to say the HR31 was a completely different car to the one first encountered in 1988, every single part of it had since been made a little bit better, as Alan Heaphy could attest. In the late 1980s, Heaphy had been running Nissan's European campaign from the U.K, but pulling double-duty with trips Down Under to work with Gibson on development of the GTS-R. Eventually he joined Gibson full-time, and never hesitated in reckoning the Australian cars were better than the factory ones racing in Europe, as all those little improvements added up to a big difference.

"Fred's team had a better ability to 'massage' bits than what we did in Europe," Heaphy said. "They finished up with about 465hp – they had better fuel than we did in Europe – we got about 430hp. They homologated the 5-speed Holinger gearbox; we had a Nissan box, which was dreadful." A switch from Dunlop tyres to a full factory deal with Yokohama in 1989 was part of the package as well, but the rabbit hole went even deeper than that. Gibson went as far as to make his own front suspension strut assemblies, finding the originals weren't tough enough to stand up to the strain of racing.

We virtually did all the homologation for the DR30 Skyline because we wanted to design and use our own parts right from the start. So when the HR31 came along, we just carried across things that we'd developed for the DR30 like uprights, suspension arms etc.

All the Nissan race cars since the Bluebirds had independent rear suspension but that was their downfall because they were all pretty bad independent race cars. The thing that made the biggest difference was when radial race tyres came in during the DR30 days.

They really suited the rear suspension because what a radial tyre needs to work properly is a lot of static negative camber. It made a huge difference to the back of the car because the independent suspension had lots of negative camber in it, so we learned a lot from that and ended up running something like five degrees of negative on the front as well to make the radial work there too.

We transferred all of that suspension knowledge to the HR31 but it was still not a great handling car. It was a very difficult car to get the handling right, but we just chipped away at it. – Fred Gibson, Mark Oastler's Nissan Skyline HR31 GTS-R: The unsung hero of Nissan's first ATCC victory, Shannons Club

It says a lot about the skill of lead driver Jim Richards that he was able to be far more generous about it. "The Skyline was like a bigger, more powerful BMW M3," he said. "It was two-wheel drive, it had another 130 horsepower, a 5-speed gearbox, independent suspension and it was fantastic to drive. You could drive the wheels off it all day."

Richards at a test early in 1989. (Source)

But the car wasn't without a crippling flaw: power. Even with 465hp on tap, it was still giving away a hundred horses to the average Sierra, and even more to the really god-tier ones. Heaphy blamed that on the turbocharger itself, which couldn't get enough flow through to challenge an RS500 on top-end power.

It had a big Garrett turbocharger, which was one of its biggest Achilles heels; it had a big compressor housing but a small exhaust which limited the engine.

You can stuff as much [air] in as you like on the intake side, but if you can't feed it out the back it doesn't go anywhere. And if you can't get it out you can't get it in, simple as that. Fred tried to get it changed but by that stage the GT-R was on the drawing board. – Alan Heaphy

Fred had little choice but to work with what he had.

The engine was completely different to the DR30, though, so it was a whole new engine programme. Then we also had to convert our Electromotive [engine management] system that we put on the four cylinder DR30 with the Americans to the six cylinder HR31 Skylines here, so that was difficult to do as well. – Fred Gibson, Mark Oastler's Nissan Skyline HR31 GTS-R: The unsung hero of Nissan's first ATCC victory, Shannons Club

It would also be a mistake to imagine just because there was less of it, the power delivery was any more user-friendly than an RS500. In 2013 none other than John Bowe tested a refurbished Skyline for Unique Cars magazine, and even this veteran of the DJR Sierras and works Volvos came away shocked at the lag.

That straight six is only two litres but it runs terrific amounts of boost so dealing with the turbo lag is a technique in itself. When it comes on, it comes on! You're always battling exit oversteer and wheelspin. I know the turbo is not as big as the Sierras that we were racing at the time and I was expecting this to be more pleasant to drive with less turbo lag. You have to get on the throttle early before a corner then across the apex, back out of the throttle. It's a backward way of driving compared to a naturally aspirated car with its instant throttle response.

But the most impressive thing is that sound. A straight six has a real howl about it; sounds awesome! – John Bowe, 1988 Nissan Skyline GTS Group A Review, Unique Cars

Again, it's a testament to Jim Richards that he made it all look so easy. Elsewhere in the article, Bowe lets it drop that, by the end of a race at Amaroo Park, his Sierra had so little tyre left that it would wheelspin all the way up Bitupave Hill – even in top gear! The Skyline wouldn't have had it much easier, and yet Richards had hooked through those turns as smooth as buttered glass. Such was the man's ability that the opposition's only hope was to pray for some wide, open spaces where they could wind up the boost and try to outrun him.

But today we were at Winton.

Family-Friendly Entertainment
It was interesting to see from the video below what other series were on the bill at this meeting. Winton's ATCC round was also Round 4 of the Australian Formula Ford Championship, billed as the "Motorcraft Driver to Europe Series", a series which (spoiler alert) would ultimately be won by a young tearaway named Russell Ingall. One to watch.

Formula Holden was also back for Round 2 of the Australian Drivers’ Championship, and again several of the pro drivers were having to climb out of their open-wheelers, get their heads together and jump back into touring cars straight after. Amazing to think that only twenty years earlier this sort of thing had been the norm, which goes to show why Jackie Stewart can still lecture young drivers on mind management today (although in Jackie's day the cars weren't quite so physical to drive, and setting them up wasn't the arduous process it was to become in the digital age).

The final support act was Round 4 of the Australian Production Car Championship. This category was experiencing a bit of a renaissance thanks to CAMS banning turbo cars of the kind that had been dominant since 1984. This left imports like the Mazda RX-7 and Mitsubishi Starion out in the cold, re-framing the series for the naturally-aspirated six-cylinder Falcons and Commodores Australians were actually driving in those days. It was this kind of racing that had made the legend of Bathurst in the first place, so the following year would see history come full circle when the category would give us the inaugural Bathurst 12 Hour. Although they look slow and lumbering compared to proper racecars, it's worth noting the new-gen EA Falcons and VN Commodores were actually faster than classics like the original GT-HO and Monaro, despite being no lighter and having half the horsepower. And they say there's no such thing as progress...

But the focus of the meeting was once more on the stars of the Shell Ultra Touring Car Series, and their focus was once again on the tyres. The commentators mentioned that it was unseasonably hot for April, and the sky in the video looks overcast. In other words, they probably had one of those violent Victorian storm fronts moving in, making both the air and the tarmac hot and greasy. As a result – this sort of thing happens in a tyre war – the Dunlop runners were in deep, deep trouble. Dick Johnson and teammate John Bowe had actually sorted through five different compounds chasing the grip, but had eventually qualified only 8th and 9th respectively, unable to get their tyres to switch on and stick to the road. They were beaten by Larry Perkins and Win Percy, who put the rival Walkies 7th and 6th, also respectively – yes, pinch yourself, the fastest Sierras in the world had been out-qualified by two naturally-aspirated V8s! Larry's time of 1:02.93 was only a hundredth of a second faster than Dick's, but that was enough for the stopwatch to measure, so it was enough to matter.

The winners of the weather lottery, however, were the Yokohama runners at the front – Glenn Seton (1:02.77), Mark Skaife (1:02.70) and Tony Longhurst (1:02.62) had all done solid jobs, but the real star of qualifying had been Alan Jones, who'd grabbed his yellow Sierra by the scruff of the neck and manhandled it around in a mere 1:02.33, nearly a third of a second (or if you prefer, exactly one blink) faster than his teammate in the same car. That was a mighty effort, worthy of song, but even that hadn't been enough to secure pole. Instead, Gentleman Jim Richards had been the only driver to break into the 1:01's, coaxing his Skyline around in 1:01.97 to take the prime starting position for himself. Some days there was just no dealing with the master.

The talk of qualifying however was a protest (and subsequent screaming match) involving Colin Bond, who after qualifying 10th with a 1:03.24, found himself victim of a protest by Allan Moffat. The rules this year (as described by Neil Crompton in the broadcast, at least) required each driver to nominate two sets of tyres – eight total – of identical construction, compound and brand on Saturday morning. Those tyres then had to carry them through both sessions of qualifying and then the race on Sunday. This was how CAMS were enforcing the ban on special qualifying tyres, and it shows the kinds of resources the giants were throwing at the series – if Johnson really had been able to choose from five different compounds, that was potentially forty tyres per car Dunlop had brought to the event.

Bond, however, had apparently nominated four tyres of one (unspecified) brand, and then four from his sponsor, Toyo. Even though uncertainties in the wording had led to some creative interpretations among the teams, this was apparently against the rules and, having seen his driver Gregg Hansford qualify one place behind Bond, Moffat had every reason to make a strategic protest. What he probably hadn't expected was for Bond – one of the most affable, easygoing people you'd ever meet in pit lane – to explode in his face as a result. A few pointed out that it might've been a bit much to expect a smaller company like Toyo to provide eight tyres per car the way Dunlop and Yokohama could, and others whispered that there was still bad blood between Moffat and Bond thanks to a prizemoney dispute dating back to their iconic 1-2 at Bathurst in '77.

Whatever the truth, Bond filed an appeal but had to suffer his time being struck off for a "tyre restriction infringement", leaving him to start from the back of the grid. It was going to be a long day at the office in the Caltex Sierra.

Light 'Em Up
So there they sat at the front of the grid: white cars and yellow cars, B&H Sierras versus factory Nissans. When the green flag flew Tony Longhurst was again slow off the line, leaving him beaten into the first turn by Skaife and immediately under threat from Johnson and Seton. But once again Alan Jones had made a demon start, surging off after Jim Richards, who'd made one that was quietly efficient to take an early lead. Together they zoomed out of Turn 1 with a slight but handy gap over the rest.

While Kevin Waldock went for a wild ride through the grass and dirt after badly overcooking it on cold tyres, Win Percy was seen hustling his Walky into 4th between Skaife and Longhurst, a sterling performance in the obese Holden. But at the front it was Richards leading the way with Jones chasing hard, the two of them already pulling a significant gap on the rest of the field.

But Jonesy had banked on a fight, and he brought it from minute one. Down the back straight between 7 and 8, Jones had a look up the inside but Richards gave him a gentle nose shave to turn him off the idea. Undeterred, Jones soon pushed Richards into a mistake, goading him into running wide coming out of the Esses onto the start/finish straight. Front tyres sliding in that heart-sinking way, Richards came within a whisker of wearing the tyre bundle sitting on the exit of the turn, but without losing his cool he kept it together and drove through the understeer like the champ he was, staying on the track when so many of us would've ended up in the dust. Nevertheless, the moment gave Jones the opening he was looking for, and he zipped right to pull alongside down the front straight, then dived under him into the first turn. The race was a minute old, and already we’d seen the move of the race!

Even better, with Skaife acting as the cork in the bottle behind them, all these two grand masters had to worry about was each other.

Win Percy did his best to harry Skaife, and although it was a futile gesture just being this competitive was a delightful surprise for the Holden fans. Crompo mused that the team did do a lot of their testing at Winton, after all – the local circuit, when you were based in Victoria – and also that Win had chosen a softer rubber compound than Perkins and perhaps the turbo cars around him. Not necessarily a "glory over substance" move either, given that passing wasn't always easy at Winton, and you tended to race where you qualified.

Six minutes in, and Richards was beginning to creep back up on the bumper of Jones. Seven minutes, and he was close enough to make the move. Chasing Jonesy into Turn 6, or Penrite Corner as it was known that day, Richards lifted his foot off the brake a fraction of a second early and coasted to the apex, sneaking beneath Jones just as he was turning in. Too experienced to dispute that right now, Jones tamely followed him through the rest of the Turn 6/7 complex, but his frustration was clear when he got into a wide tank-slapper on the exit of 7. Too much right foot too soon, Jonesy – not even an F1 World Champion could keep the tail of a Sierra in line once the turbo spooled up. As they threaded between the backmarkers that were already making a nuisance of themselves, it was clear Richards was not going to be a pushover today: that was the last pass for the lead the race would see.

That said, Jones still had a 3-second gap back to Skaife, who'd done an awful lot of laps here lately between racing his Formula Holden and Skyline GTS-R, and testing the new GT-R. With ten minutes gone, however, the youngster had been able to eke out a bit of a gap over Percy and go from defender to attacker, inching up on Jonesy instead. Into the first turn Skaife got a nose inside, but he was a bit too aggressive and gave Jones a nudge, which saw the yellow car lose all momentum and skate off the track through the dust. Jonesy rejoined still alongside, but Skaife now had the inside line into Turn 2, so the move was as good as done.

Clearly neither Nissan driver was taking prisoners today, but only one was a true master of the craft. The other was still an apprentice, as demonstrated by what happened next. With the pass only just done, Skaife slowed through the run up to Penrite, letting Jones back past without a fight – then Percy and Longhurst as well for good measure. Karma for the love tap? No, just the result, cause and effect. Skaife headed straight back to the pits, where the mechanics removed the front wheels and peered into the space behind them, trying to spot the problem. At first they couldn't, so the wheels were reattached and Skaife sent back out, rejoining 21st, but only a lap or two later he was back in, and this time it was terminal. The coming-together with Jones had damaged something critical, and the car simply couldn't go any further. Skaife climbed out and removed his earplugs to start discussing it with the mechanics, eyes neither angry nor apologetic. He'd had the Formula Holden race all sewn up until his gearbox packed it in, so this was definitely a bitter weekend for young Skaifey.

On his tour back to the pits however Skaife had momentarily baulked Win Percy, a moment Tony Longhurst had taken like an invitation on an embossed card. Through 6 and 7 Tony all but climbed into the car with Percy, and then out of Turn 8, he dropped the hammer and furiously powered alongside and then past. Job done. Sure, a small biff with Percy into Turn 6 had left his front bumper a tiny bit askew, but that was all part of the fun in this game. The big black-and-white Walky was starting to go off the boil, leaving Gibson Motorsport 1st thanks to Richo, but Tony Longhurst Racing 2nd and 3rd, ahead of a factory car.

With 28 minutes gone, Seton – rear bumper rather flapping in the breeze after a first-lap altercation with another car – was held up for a while by Ray Lintott in the #12 Valvoline Sierra. Fun fact: this car was apparently DJR3, the Johnson car that had won the 1988 ATCC and then gone to the U.K. to pulverise Rouse and Eggenberger at Silverstone. Again, it goes to show how much development was going on that the fastest Sierra in the world... wasn't, anymore. Even better, behind Seton in 5th were Johnson himself, then Bowe, Perkins and then, gloriously, Colin Bond in 9th. After starting dead last, he'd fought tooth-and-nail back to the leading pack on one of the most crowded circuits of the year. And well behind him was Peter Brock, who wasn’t featuring in this race at all: clearly his Bridgestones weren't very happy today. After thriving in the chill of Tasmania, it seemed the muggy heat of Winton was not to their liking – a worrying sign when the next round would be Lakeside in Queensland.

Then, apparently, an ad break kicked in, and while the viewers were being exhorted to buy Shell unleaded Win Percy stopped dead in the middle of the track. We were told (rather than shown) that HRT engine-builder Rob Benson had sprinted out to have a look, opening the passenger door to inspect something. They got it going again momentarily, but like Skaife it was a false dawn, as the car retired soon after with an electrical fault. It was a tough blow to the Holden fans who'd got excited at the thought of their baby in with a shot at the podium, but such was motorsport some days.

Dick Johnson meanwhile was finding his Dunlops were holding up rather well: they'd had no grip at the start of the race, and they still had most of it left.

Neil Crompton: How are the tyres holding up, Dick?

Dick Johnson: Actually pretty good. It's hard to forget grip when you haven't got any to start with. It's a funny surface here, it's a very low friction surface and it's very hard to get tyres to operate.

As if to punctuate his point, the onboard RaceCam showed Dick understeer clumsily out of Turn 8 onto the back straight, then apply an armfull of opposite lock as the rear stepped out under power. Did you prefer understeer or oversteer? Didn't matter, this car had both!

Chief commentator Mike Raymond also knew how to extract one of the classic Johnson-isms:

Raymond: What is the definition of Winton, Dick?

Johnson: Winton? It's like running a marathon around your clothesline!

But however bad things were for Dick, it was smooth sailing compared to Murray Carter. For the second time in two races, poor Murray's beautiful blue President Ford Sierra had caught fire, and this time it wasn't a discrete bit of under-bonnet flame. This time the whole car was completely hidden by its own smoke, going up like a Blue Mountains bushfire. Murray had no choice but to park it on the grass at the top of the track, inside the double loop the locals inevitably called The Tits (would that make Carter's parking spot The Cleavage, then?). With the car obscured but the driver okay, there really wasn't much to say, except to console the poor bastard. Even in a sport as tough as motor racing, it was a bad day when you had to watch your expensive investment literally go up in smoke for the second time in as many races.

At the front though, with 45 out of the 50 minutes done, Jim Richards had a 6.6-second gap over Longhurst in 2nd. This race wasn't just landed, it was scaled and gutted and ready for the table. But that didn't mean it was all over. At forty-nine minutes and thirty seconds – just 30 seconds from the end! – Bond and Perkins chose this moment to have a silly incident. Bondy tried for a wild send up the inside of Perkins' privateer Walky at the Esses, and overcooked it completely, locking up all four wheels in a heart-stopping slide. There was nothing he could do but shut his eyes and wait to land in the sand trap. Braking even harder to try and avoid him, Perkins also locked up and momentarily had the rear try and overtake the front, but he gathered it up and tiptoed through the Esses with only two wheels still on the track. Bond rather sheepishly rejoined back behind Larry, neither having gained anything (or lost anything) from the encounter. Clearly, after driving through five-eighths of the grid, there was still a lot of adrenaline in that Caltex Sierra's cockpit.

But of course, Richards took the flag, with Gregg Hansford just in front of him – meaning he'd lapped everybody up to 11th place. Alan Jones' early showboating hadn't meant much in the end, as he crossed the finish line in 3rd place behind Tony Longhurst, having submissively moved over to let his team owner through at the halfway mark. Crompo explained this aberrant behaviour from the normally fighty Jones, pointing out that Tony held the most important thing of all in motor racing: the chequebook. Jones sensibly let the man who paid him bank the points. After that the finish was as they'd run, with Glenn Seton 4th, Johnson and Bowe 5th & 6th, and Perkins 7th ahead of a chastened but uncreased Bond.

Winton had been a dominant victory for Jim Richards. Although Johnson still sat at the top of the championship table, with 60 points, Richo had now moved himself up to second with 56. It was officially game on for the championship, which was looking more and more like it would be an arm-wrestle between these two all-time greats. Bowe had dropped back to third, with 48 points, while 2nd in the race had now pushed Tony Longhurst up to fourth in the championship, with 27. Fifth still belonged to Peter Brock with 25 points, most of them from Symmons Plains.

So with four rounds complete we now had the fabulous tarmac of Lakeside to look forward to – Dick Johnson's home race, but one he'd have to face with serious question marks over the performance of his Dunlops in hot weather. And between now and then, we'd also have Colin Bond's appeal, which would surely bring the tyre restrictions to a head and force some sort of clarification from the officials. Four down, four to go: there was still everything to race for.

25 March: Two Out Of Three Ain't Bad

Dick Johnson bumped his win rate for the year up to 66% in the Australian Touring Car Championship's grand return to Phillip Island. Even better, teammate John Bowe was right behind him at the flag to pull off a formation finish, so for a moment things almost looked like they were returning to the old days. In reality, though we didn't know it yet, it was the end of one era and the dawn of another.

Hello, Old Friend
The bald fact was that by the time the Group A stars assembled for the race meeting on Thursday, Phillip Island had not seen a touring car in thirteen long years. It had been scheduled to host the finale of the 1978 season – the McEwan Spanners 250 – but that event had been moved to Bob Jane's Calder Park at the last minute, leaving the 1977 Ready Plan Insurance 500k the unheralded send-off to one of the true greats of Australian racing. The reason behind the move had been the bugbear that plagued the track from its very beginnings: problems with the tarmac itself.

The old bridge in 1949 (source).

See, Phillip Island is an island, so when the track was first built in 1956 there were only two ways to get there – a rather weedy ferry service connecting Stony Point to the greater metropolis of Cowes, or an even weedier wooden suspension bridge stretching from San Remo to Newhaven – a structure that dated back to 1948. That made the whole place rather inaccessible, despite being only a two-hour drive from Melbourne, so any racetrack built there had to do what the inaccessible parts of Australia did for road surfacing in those days – primitive cold-mix bitumen. The precise rationale for this decision is debated to this day: some say the equipment needed to lay proper hot-mix was too heavy to get across the bridge or onto the ferry. Some say the island was just too far from the nearest mixing plant for proper hot-mix to be practicable. Still others speculated that because the Phillip Island Auto Racing Club (PIARC), the track's owners, had financed the whole thing out of member donations, cold-mix was just the best they could afford.

Whatever the truth, the folly of cold-mix was laid bare when the Armstrong 500 (forerunner to today's Bathurst 1000) came to town in 1960. A grid of forty-plus production cars on skinny pizza-cutter wheels pounding around for 167 laps proved more than the brittle track surface could take, and in three 500s the track was reduced to rubble three times. The Armstrong 500 was forced to find a new home and, bankrupted, in 1967 PIARC sold the complex to Len Lukey of Lukey Mufflers fame (and also 1959 Australian Drivers' Champion and a great early rival of Jack Brabham). Lukey patched it up and carried on hosting races for the next decade, running it alongside his other track at Hume Weir, but after Lukey's death in 1978 the passion behind the project went cold. The family didn't see the point of endlessly shelling out for roadworks just to hold a motor race, and by the time the 1980s arrived, big-time racing was seemingly over for good. The land reverted back to sheep grazing, with the derelict race control tower the only hint of its past greatness.

Source

But then in 1984, local businessman Fergus Cameron bought the facility for $800,000, with big plans to reopen – plans which immediately stalled over questions of rebuilding and long-term leases. Happily however, while the suits were arguing over the details, a certain Wayne Gardner, the "Wollongong Whiz", emerged into world motorcycle racing and lit a fire under the whole project. Gardner won three races in 1986, then the FIM 500cc World Championship in 1987, and it seemed the whole of Australia discovered motorcycle racing at the same time. Local enthusiasts, entrepreneurs and politicians sniffed an opportunity, and as early as January 1987 plans were in the works to stage Australia's first Motorcycle Grand Prix in 1989. Thanks to the delays however, there were serious question marks over whether the circuit could be made ready in time, as the surface and facilities were seriously dilapidated, with sheep still grazing on the grass that had grown through the potholes.

Riding to the rescue came the creator of the Adelaide street circuit that was now hosting the Australian Grand Prix, Bob Barnard.

I built the Adelaide street circuit for the first Australian Formula 1 Grand Prix in 1985, and in 1986 I started looking at the rise of Wayne Gardner as a possible 500cc champion. That's when I began thinking about staging a 500cc Grand Prix here. I knew that the only circuit that could host it was Phillip Island, since I raced historic cars there when we had to scrape the sheep droppings off it before going racing... – Bob Barnard, Australian Muscle Car #89

A meeting with Fergus Cameron in 1987 created a company called Barfield to oversee rebuilding of the track and infrastructure. Barnard owned 50% of Barfield and Cameron another substantial stake, with Barnard also winning provisional rights to the Grand Prix, subject to the circuit being successfully homologated. Barnard played an incredible game, doing dozens of byzantine deals with governments, sponsors, TV networks and dozens of other interested parties, with loyalties and agendas changing constantly. At the eleventh hour Bob Jane threw Calder Park into the mix as an alternative, which could have torpedoed the whole project, but Barnard kept his head and saw it all through to completion – albeit at a massive cost. Barfield would be declared insolvent by 1991 and the lease would revert back to its original owners, but by then the business case had been proven and the Island was back with a vengeance.

The reworked circuit that emerged in late 1988 was barely any different from the 1956-1978 version. The run into what is now Honda Corner had been shortened by some 150 metres to create some runoff area before the fence (which couldn't be moved because there was a dam behind it), and MG Corner had been flattened slightly so that the overall length was now 4.45 rather than the old 4.82km. Compared to the butchery inflicted on some circuits brought into the modern age, however, such modifications barely amounted to a haircut, and the character of the circuit was unchanged.

There wasn't enough run-off [behind Honda] because of the dam wall on the outside of the corner and the wall itself would leak, which obviously affected the stability of the track. The way Honda Corner turned out was pretty good, and has become one of the key passing points on the track.

The other change we made was to MG. [Yamaha technical director] Warren Willing told me that the existing configuration would've meant that a 500 GP bike geared for 140km/h in first gear wouldn't make it through a race because the clutch couldn't take it. We raised MG corner 15 feet to lessen the dip into it, and we made it a bit more open so the bikes could roll through without having to slip the clutch on the exit. Keeping the integrity of the original layout was important and the changes were kept to a minimum. – Bob Barnard, AMC #89

And of course, with the local council having built a proper steel-and-concrete bridge to replace the old wooden bridge back in 1971, it also got the high-quality hot-mix surface it had always deserved. With a world-class surface to match its world-class layout, the 1989 Swan Premium Australian Motorcycle Grand Prix proved an absolute triumph, attracting 90,000 fans trackside and a TV audience of some 300 million – and sticking to the script, Wayne Gardner ran a sensational race to claim the first victory in his home country.

Now, in 1990, it was touring car racing's turn.

Under New Management
That this was a grand re-opening for Phillip Island was borne out by the massive 40-car entry list, which attracted drivers from three distinct backgrounds – the full-time professionals, the weekend warriors from Melbourne, and their opposite numbers from Sydney. It was the Sydney drivers that really gave it away: Terry Finnigan was there with his #27 Foodtown Commodore, Toyota drivers Mike Conway and Dennis Rogers were there to drive Corolla FX-GTs in the small-car class, and even Steve Reed was there to helm the #32 Lansvale Smash Repairs Commodore. The Lansvale team usually confined themselves to the Sydney venues (Amaroo and Oran Park, plus the big dance just over the mountains at Bathurst), of which Reed's job was to specialise in Oran Park. That he was interstate today when in theory he'd have to be back at work on Monday morning hinted at some serious appearance money on offer.

There was also Matt Wacker's rather attractive #42 Walky. Yellow is an underappreciated colour for racecars.

Mark Skaife was also there, having been marked absent from the Symmons Plains round. Skaife's main job right now was not to race but to get the new R32 Skyline sorted and ship-shape, and testing a car as high-tech as the R32 while race-prepping two HR31s would've stretched even the Gibson team's vast resources. But Phillip Island was right in the Melbourne-based outfit's backyard, and – probably a bigger consideration than we realise today – Skaife was also contesting the Formula Holden race being held the same day, which was actually Round 1 of the 1990 Australian Drivers' Championship. Essentially, this was a series for hand-me-down Formula 3000 cars powered by tuned-up versions of the new VN Commodore's 3.8-litre V6, and guest commentator (and former Australian Drivers' Champion himself) John Bowe noted, "Last time I drove an open-wheeler was at the Grand Prix meeting in Adelaide in '86, and I must admit to getting itchy feet occasionally. But when I see them go off the end of the main straight here flat in fifth gear, I decide I've done the right thing..."

In the end, oil pressure issues sidelined Skaife, leaving him unable to qualify and so to contest only the Formula Holden race, but he was far from the only driver pulling double duty this weekend.* Longtime Toyota Team Australia pairing John Smith and Drew Price were both attempting the double, and Smith unexpectedly revealed there was a risk involved when he had "an almighty off" in the warm-up session that completely destroyed his Ralt. Luckily he emerged unharmed, and that he bounced back from his visit to the medical centre to take the next start in his Supra said everything you needed to know about your average racing driver...

Also on the Formula Holden grid? Channel Seven commentator Neil Crompton, who no doubt would've been pulling double duty if only Brock or Percy'd had a car to spare. (Source)

Another who had an impressive accident was Win Percy, who all but wrote off his #16 Walky in practice on Friday. Now in their third meeting together, the new Holden Racing Team was finally starting to gel, which was just as well now that Percy had just handed them an emergency rebuild.

At Phillip Island I hit oil on the Friday and stuffed the front of the car. I went back home to Melbourne thinking that was the end of the weekend. They literally gutted the car overnight and took it to a local body shop and they phoned me to come back for qualifying. It was ready to run! The initial small group of men were unbelievable buddies.

I remember when I started with Tom he offered me a drive full-time in 1980. He said, "You can drive well and the boys like you," meaning, that the boys get on with you as much as you are a good driver and I think that's what made our team so good at HRT. We had guys who could work together through all hours and could be happy in each other's company. – Win Percy, Holden Racing Team: 20th Anniversary

In that qualifying session Percy could only manage 9th with a lap of 1:40.43, which wasn't too bad when they were ahead of nine turbo cars, but still slightly annoying when it was two places behind the rival Walky of Larry Perkins, who was half a second faster. Pole of course had gone to a Sierra, but it was the #25 Benson & Hedges car of Tony Longhurst that took that coveted grid spot, with a scorching 1:39.03 lap. The DJR winning machines we were used to seeing at the front were in fact only on the second row, meaning the front row was completed by the #30 Peter Jackson car of Glenn Seton – an impressive achievement for what was still basically a father-and-son team, even if it was made up of experienced professionals financed by Big Tobacco.

Against such opposition, that there were any Commodores at all in the top ten spoke volumes of Percy and Perkins' car preparation, talent and balls. But in truth, there was a clear difference between the best in the country and the second tier, as between Gregg Hansford's 11th-place ANZ Sierra and Kevin Waldock's similar Playscape machine was a vast, gaping, 1.3-second gap (1:40.67 vs 1:42.04). The difference could've come down to a number of things – engine tune, chassis balance, and given the long corners of the track itself, experience and confidence would've counted for a lot. But much of it no doubt also came down, yet again, to tyres.

After qualifying on Saturday, with two of their bitterest rivals starting ahead of them, there were none but long faces over in the Dick Johnson Racing garage. As noted, the Shell team ran on Dunlops, and at Phillip Island that should've been a huge advantage – although the Nissan team had done some of their testing here, it was nothing compared to the massive test session Dunlop had conducted with the Nissan/Lola Group C and Dome Formula 3000 teams back in January (it turned out it was cheaper to fly to Australia for testing than it was to hire Suzuka at $5,000 an hour!). With everything they'd learned, Dunlop had apparently decided the Island presented some special challenges that would require a unique compound when the tourers came back in March, and they duly scuttled back to the factory to cook up the rubber they thought they'd need. Problem was, when those tyres netted them only 3rd and 4th on the grid and didn't seemed to have worked at any point during the previous two days, both DJR and Dunlop were sure they'd got it wrong.

They needn't have worried.

Oh Yes, I'm the Great Pretender...
The race boiled down to a contest between those who had it and those who did not. There was no hiding at Phillip Island, you really did have to have it all – power, grip, and a well-balanced chassis underneath you. If you didn't have all that, you wouldn't have the confidence to get on the power early enough and lose speed all down the following straight. More than anything, with downforce more of an afterthought on these cars, you needed a set of tyres that you could lean on lap after lap without worrying too much about wear. With the circuit dominated by the four high-speed left-handers at the Southern Loop, Siberia, Lukey Heights and the unnamed final turn onto pit straight, the right-hand set especially were in for a caning, and the race would surely go to whoever could maximise both mid-corner speed and tyre life. Problem was, those two things were mutually exclusive...

As they raised the green flag for the start, everyone had a bit of a creep on the line, but no penalties were enacted – I suppose it was a case of, "If everyone cheats, it's like no-one did." When they finally waved the green, Seton got away smoothly and into a car-length early lead, but Longhurst bogged down off the line and found himself swamped by both the Shell Sierras.

The pack behaved themselves through Turn 1 but couldn't get through the Southern Loop without incident. Exactly what happened is unknown – the broadcast never showed a replay – but at some point Peter Brock copped a hit from behind and got turned around, finishing up facing the wrong way with his rear bumper hanging loose. That left him staring down the barrel of all the Corollas and Commodores that made up the rear of the grid coming straight at him – it only would’ve taken one driver not paying full attention to end in a colossal accident. Thankfully it never came, and after a quick spin-turn Brock was touring back to the pits for repairs, the first of many, many visits to the pits for him today.

So who had hit him? You tell me. It might've been coincidence, but Ray Lintott's #12 Valvoline Sierra was seen with matching right-front corner damage. The front-left of Steve Reed's Lansvale Smash Repairs Commodore was also severely damaged, limping back to the pits on three wheels with the front-left tyre gone. There was no shortage of suspects for the crime, the problem was narrowing down the list. Whoever it was, when he got back to pit lane Brock's mechanics plugged in the air jack and removed the damaged bumper within seconds, then stood back and released their man, who gunned it out of the pits like he’d just seen the bailiffs coming for him.

Through the opening laps the order was Seton, Johnson, Longhurst, Bowe and then – incredibly – Win Percy in the #16 HRT Walky. The factory Holden had made up some grid spots in that opening bingle, sure, but since then he'd passed Alan Jones – a frontrunning Sierra! – on actual pace. Admittedly it was early days yet, but for the moment he was keeping up with the very best. Unfortunately, just as the Holden fans started to get excited we saw that the front chin spoiler had come loose and was dragging on the tarmac. The overnight rush job to put the car back together had come back to haunt them, and every fan's fingers crossed in the hope they wouldn't see a mechanical black flag as a result.

Four minutes in and with tyres now up to temp, it seemed Seton's early advantage was going away, the front pack separated by just 2.6 seconds overall. Johnson was easing up on him but Tony Longhurst was easing up onto them both, and under braking into the new Honda Corner on lap 3, Longhurst pulled off the move of the race as he nipped under Johnson at the last possible moment, then rotated the yellow car and smoothly powered away. Johnson had no choice but to let him go, sit back and watch as he then criss-crossed to the inside and took the racing line off Seton into Siberia immediately after, taking the race lead. Johnson followed him through, relegating Seton to 3rd in two corners – which only got worse when John Bowe also took a spot, following him through the scary rise at Lukey Heights then outbraking him down the hill into MG. That stoked our worst fears, that Seton might have a problem, and the fear was confirmed when even Win Percy caught him up and had a go at passing at Honda on the following lap. "Yeah, Seton's car's got a shocking miss by the sound of it," said Neil Crompton, after listening to the blue Sierra as it passed the commentary box.

By the start of lap 6, Seton was in the pits with his bonnet up, smartly-dressed team mechanics swarming over the machine to unplug wires and unscrew spark plugs. Pitlane reporter Cameron Williams took advantage of this enforced inactivity to shove a microphone in Seton's face and get the story. Seton did his best impression of Zeno, but it was clear he was upset.

Seton: Yeah, it's missing up at high revs, from six thousand on. And, um...that's the way it goes...

Williams: After a good start how do you feel about this? Because this could've been the best result of the championship so far for you.

Seton: I'm disappointed. The car was going so well and I reckoned we could really win this race, but mechanical problems bring us down.

Williams: A lot of people are interested in the tyre battle going on out there, what's the track performing like?

Seton: Well the track's pretty good. There's a little bit of oil on a few places, but the track's in good condition. I think it'll be very hard on tyres by the end of the race, but I think Yokohamas will win the race anyway.

Williams: Will you try and get back out?

Seton: Yeah, we'll put new plugs in it and hopefully that's all it was.

With a new set of plugs fitted Seton eventually rejoined, but he was too many laps down to be a contender after that.

At the front, Tony Longhurst was all business. Already lapping the small-class cars, Tony drove it hard to get by them through what would one day be called Stoner Corner, even getting his inside wheels into the dust. Experience shining through, there – take a calculated risk to nip past the traffic, then press on to make a gap while the opposition was stuck behind them. If only his teammate could've been so tactical: Jonesy tried dive-bombing John Bowe into Siberia and got it badly wrong, nosing Bowe into a spin and putting them both onto the grass (though thankfully, not the wall). Both got going without any apparent damage, Bowe ahead of Jones, but in the meantime Perkins and Richards both sliced between them at full racing speed, so it had been a costly mistake. Jonesy never got so close again. It also left Win Percy running in 3rd place – a potential podium in only the team’s third appearance! – with Perkins 4th. For the first time in a long time, Holden fans had something to cheer about.

Nearly 20 minutes in and there was no time to take a breath: while the commentary team took a moment to show us a replay of the start, Dick Johnson finally caught up to and then passed Tony Longhurst to take a race lead he would never lose. At the same moment, Brock returned to the pits to have his rear tyres seen to, putting him permanently out of contention for any real result. Worse, when he was next seen at full speed he was dragging a TV camera cable behind him, having snagged it on his trip through pit lane. The operator of Camera Nine was apparently shaken, but not stirred. Inevitably, Brock was shown a mechanical black flag, meaning he'd have to return to the pits yet again to have the cable cleared, meaning his goose was now cooked several times over: the rest of his race would consist mainly of return trips to pit lane to have one problem or another seen to, so regularly he might as well've crossed out the "05 Mobil" on his doors and replaced it with, "901 Frankston".

25 out of 50 minutes down, and the question of tyre life started to see some answers. Win Percy pitted for a new set of fronts, though that wasn't such a shock when his front spoiler was hanging loose and flapping in the breeze. Without the usual front-end downforce, Percy would've been dealing with a persistent understeer problem, crippling at a circuit like this where dialling in just the right entry speed was key to fast lap times. That he'd made it up to 3rd place, despite that, spoke of awesome commitment and no small amount of talent. If only he could've kept it up to the finish: instead, he rejoined 13th.

Another lap, and with a 4-second gap between Johnson and Longhurst, Tony at last gave in and headed to the pits for fresh rubber. Perkins shrugged and followed suit: having run as high as 4th, dying tyres had seen him slip back to 9th, and after his stop he rejoined behind Percy. The pretenders had put on a valiant show, but they'd made the mistake of calling the Johnson team's bluff, and it had turned out to be no bluff: Johnson and Bowe, now 1st and 2nd, really were just that fast, and they really were planning to run the whole race without stopping.

And with that awful realisation setting in, the third of the three who really had it – albeit not as much – made his presence known. Tyre life now saw Jim Richards edge upon Alan Jones and ultimately pass him on lap 20. An extra hundred horsepower wasn't worth anything if you couldn't get it to the ground, and as at Symmons Plains, Jonesy's tyres were now absolutely shot. Richo always was easy on his machinery, and that – plus experience of Phillip Island in the 1970s, no doubt – put him at a distinct advantage, especially in such a balanced, well-sorted car as the Skyline. That the race was being held on the track where the Nissan team had done most of their recent testing probably didn't hurt, either. By the time they got back to the home straight Jim was 2.2 seconds down the road from Jonesy, a huge margin to pull out in less than a lap – a clear sign the Sierras had driven too hard and melted their tyres. Defeated, Jones signalled he'd be pitting on the following lap: he rejoined 11th.

In a move that would’ve pleased the bosses at Clayton no end, Jim even came up and put a lap on John Smith in the arch-rival #15 Toyota Supra Turbo. This also, in a way, showed how right Fred Gibson was not to debut the R32 too early – the new Skyline was was in the same weight class as the Supra and was mostly 2WD and turbocharged as well, so this arguably showed where the new Skyline would run if they didn’t get it running at full capacity. Even so, with the pressure from Japan to start racing the R32 mounting, and Gibson was a brave man to still be telling them no.

With the race now definitely going Johnson's way, Mike Raymond dialled up Dick for one of those in-car chats that dazzled the Americans, picking up just as he applied the power through Siberia.

Johnson: G'day Mike. Siberia's a long way away, pal, I think you've got your wires crossed there.

Raymond: Well someone said earlier it was that warm here the penguins had taken their dinner suits off.

Johnson: Yeah, she's a bit hot. I'll tell you what, the penguins, if you've ever had a look at them, look like rats standing up with a dinner suit on!

Okay, then. (Source.)

Raymond: I'm not gonna touch that with a barge pole, Johnson. Mate everything looks pretty good, you've played a great waiting game here and you’ve got a 1-2 set up. Any problem with tyres?

Johnson: Not at the moment, but I'm just trying to look after them so we don't have a bit of a problem later on. That's the biggest problem, is being able to look after what you've got.

Raymond: Well I think it's obvious to everyone the championship this year is far more competitive. When it comes down to putting it all together, really, the Johnson Shell team have been able to do it two races in a row, very very adequately?

Johnson: Yeah, we're not there yet Mike. I might be a great optimist, but I'll tell you what, I've been there and done that before.

Raymond: Well this must seem a breeze [compared to] where you're bound for next weekend?

Johnson: Yeah, you're not wrong! It's a little bit different over there, with the good ol' boys...

Raymond: So where are you off to, Dick? To Darlington isn't it?

Johnson: Yeah, Darlington. The place where they've got that famous word, the Darlington Stripe. I hope I don’t end up with one.

Raymond: Well, looks pretty good at this stage, Johnny Bowe settling in behind you. We'll come back and talk to you a little later, let you get back on with the job.

Johnson: Thanks, Mike.

With some 40 of the 50 minutes now behind them, there was no doubt the tyres on the blood-red Shell Sierras were less than fresh, but it was also true they had a sizeable 27.6-second gap back to Jim Richards in 3rd. And with Bowe behind to act as his tail-gunner, Johnson wouldn't have to push very hard even if Richards did catch up. They could afford to just stroke it along to the finish, cruise and collect – champagne and silverware please, then feet up!

In fact, with two minutes remaining the only drama came when Murray Carter abruptly headed for the pits, and never made it. The unsponsored blue Sierra stopped in the pit lane entry with smoke billowing from the engine bay, an under-bonnet fire having started. Carter alighted and walked away looking more frustrated than alarmed, as the team and the emergency crews converged to deal with it (tellingly, the Carter team mechanics got there faster than the circuit firefighters...).

Ultimately though, the Shell Sierras crossed the start/finish line for the 30th and final time line astern, both Johnson and Bowe waving to the crowd in triumph as they greeted the chequered flag. Behind them Richards took 3rd after a spirited and highly professional drive, with Colin Bond 4th and Gregg Hansford 5th, both more by surviving than driving. DJR had claimed their first 1-2 in some time, and it seemed the big Dick was back on track to claim that unprecedented sixth championship, with 52 points now putting him at the head of the table. His sidekick Bowe was 2nd with 42, though Jim Richards – the man who could take it all off them – was a quiet 3rd with 36. Despite strong early showings, Longhurst and Seton languished on 12 and 10 points respectively, behind even Peter Brock's static 23. It was only a shame both Seton and Brock had been taken out for silly reasons so early in the day – it would've been interesting to see where their Bridgestones and Yokohamas might have put them by race's end.

In fact, though nobody knew it then, this was to be Dick Johnson's final ATCC round victory. Although he still had heat wins in his future, not to mention his third and arguably greatest victory at the Mountain, never again would he wear the victor's laurels for a round overall. The close of the 1980s was the end of the era of Johnson, of George Fury, of Brock and Moffat; the coming of Phillip Island heralded the beginning of the era of Seton, Ingall, Lowndes and Skaife. The 1980s were done; the 1990s were just beginning.

*And another name of note name in the Formula Holden ranks? Richard Davison, son of the late beloved Lex Davison and father of future V8 stars Alex and Will Davison. That's one family up there with the Andrettis and Unsers.

11 March: Tyre Terror in Tassie

Dick Johnson found the groove again in Round 2 of the ATCC, held deep within the map of Tassie. On a power circuit like Symmons Plains the event was always going to be a Sierra benefit, but with so many Sierras on the grid nowadays it wasn't at all clear which of them was going to come out on top. The result ultimately came down to the black art of the modern racing industry – the tyres.

Symmons Says
1990 actually marked the 30th anniversary of Symmons Plains Raceway. Carved out of a corner of the Youl estate near Launceston, with its two-storey Georgian brick home dating back to 1839, the permanent Symmons Plains circuit had replaced the discontinued once-a-year Longford road course, which by the late 1960s had become too dangerous (or too unprofitable) to be Tasmania's racing tentpole. Despite being a regular fixture on the schedule since then, Symmons had rather been robbed of memorable title-deciding moments after the 1969 and 1970 seasons, when it had been moved from the season finale to the curtain-raiser, or close to it. The reason was the same as why NASCAR only holds its Michigan rounds in June or July: latitude.

The Apple Isle was and is a revhead paradise, home to the brilliantly laid-out (but club-level only) Baskerville Raceway, the miniature Stelvio of Jacob's Ladder, and other wondrous bits of tarmac that in a couple of years would be hosting the Targa Tasmania... but you just couldn't ask an interstate audience to sit trackside in Tassie any day outside high summer. Two centuries of careful inbreeding might've made the hardy Taswegians able to bear the bitter cold, enough to lend their support to club- and state-level meetings and various other weekend warriors, but if you wanted to hold a national-level race that could attract visitors from the mainland (or the North Island, as they sardonically call us) to boost your economy... yeah, mid-March really was your cut-off. Any date after that, and the slightest breeze would pick up a hint of the snow likely settling on the hilltops to the south and leave your patrons hugging themselves trying to get the feeling back in their fingers, or forming a grumbling queue in front of the tea urn at the chip van (coffee stands were an innovation the 90’s were yet to bring).

So although the circuit was nevertheless a stringent test of skill, the history of Symmons was one of mostly-forgotten duels, race results that merely chipped in a few early points to drivers who would later be fighting over the championship. A shame, and less than it deserved, but that’s how it would be in 1990 as well.

Tassie Time Trials
The combination of long straights and highly boostable Cosworth engines meant qualifying was always going to be a Sierra party, and so it turned out: nine of the top ten qualifiers, including the fastest six, were all driving Fords. Fastest of them all was Peter Brock, a tenth faster than his pole last year with a lap of 55.86 seconds, thanks to a special relationship with his tyre partners at Bridgestone. Rule changes for the year meant ultra-sticky qualifying tyres could no longer be used, but such was the pace of development that even on race tyres (and with the extra 80kg of ballast on board), records could still fall only a year after they were set.

Things have changed since 1989. We arrived here very wet behind the ears as far as Sierras were concerned, however 12 months down the track we're now doing better than the qualifying times we did last year on race tyres. The interesting thing is that the field is so close... – Peter Brock

He wasn't wrong: although good for pole, his lap had been barely five hundredths of a second faster than Tony Longhurst in P2, and only three-quarters of a second faster than teammate Andrew Miedecke, who was almost certainly given leftover practice tyres and a B-spec car made from spare parts. Longhurst of course had the benefit of driving chassis TLR2, a car with the steering wheel on the left at a circuit with mostly left-hand turns, but he was probably running an engine tuned with the latest tips from Wolf Racing in Germany, not the Rouse engine Brocky was using. He was also, like the Johnson machines, running on Dunlop tyres rather than Bridgestones. It was a sign of how intense the competition was that all had qualified so close together, as despite the wildly different technical backgrounds the gap from Brock's 1st to Gregg Hansford's 10th place in the Eggenberger car was less than 1.4 seconds. But the real shock was Jim Richards in the works Skyline, who was right among them in 7th, the sole interloper in the top ten.

We've been pleasantly surprised in practice so far that we're so close to them. And although we're 7th on the grid, there's only about half- to three-quarters of a second difference between the first seven or eight cars. That, to us, is very important, because it means we are competitive with the Sierras on this track where we thought we wouldn't be. – Jim Richards

Indeed, to be in the middle of the Sierra pack in qualifying was to be sitting pretty on race pace...

Rubber's Racin'
The car at the centre of events for the 1990 Symmons round was this one.

Well, not this one, the sister car just like it.

I don't know that this photo wasn't taken at Symmons Plains, so I'll post it here. If you know better, the comment box is below.

Brock's Sierra was a little different from the others on the grid. For one, he was about the only man in Australia still relying on Andy Rouse for parts and tuning chips – everyone else'd had a gutful of the bastard long ago. For another, if you choose to watch the video below, you'll notice frequent puffs of oil smoke from the #05's exhaust even when it's not in trouble. This was likely because of its unique exhaust layout, which exited from the rear of the car rather than under the door. After a chat with long-time Brock mechanic John Heckrath, the V8 Sleuth revealed this exhaust layout had been fitted purely because Brock didn’t like the noise, to the point that even wore noise-cancelling earphones during the races! The team only used this exhaust layout in the sprint rounds, as it was said to drain excessive oil out of the engine. Which, watching the footage, you can see every time Brock lifts off the throttle.

And of course, the third difference was that Brock's cars ran on Bridgestone tyres rather than the Dunlops of the Longhurst and Johnson teams, or the Yokohamas of Seton's team. Having proved supreme in qualifying, the Bridgestones would remain supreme for 35 of the 50 minutes on Sunday. Unfortunately, as they say, it's the last lap that you have to lead, not the first...

At the start they all got away in a huge cloud of smoke – most of it from Alan Jones – but Brocky got that much further away and barrelled into Turn 1 in the lead, leaving the yellow-team train on the outside rail behind him, and the red-team train on the inside. Longhurst then out-dragged Dick down the back straight to take 2nd place, but Jonesy had a problem right at the start, generating an enormous cloud of smoke and touring around his opening lap to pit and see the doctor. It emerged, after the commentators had a quick consult with team manager Frank Gardner, that Jonesy had blown the left-rear tyre on the starting line and needed a replacement. He rejoined, but at the back of the field, a lap down.

At the front, however, the pace was searing, Brock's first flying lap a 56.8, compared to the 55.9 he'd done the day before. On cold tyres with full fuel, that was a pretty solid effort. Despite that, Longhurst was the man who was on a mission, pushing his car hard trying to catch the Mobil #05 ahead of him. Behind the lead trio was a modest gap, then John Bowe, Glenn Seton, Andrew Miedecke and finally Jim Richards, first non-Sierra in 7th.

After ten minutes of racing, Brock was 3.4 seconds up the road and gone: Longhurst's early charge was over, his mind now on the much more patient (but prowling nevertheless) Dick Johnson behind him. Tony in fact had a problem: after the first ad break, the telecast returned to show a replay of Tony being passed by Dick in Turn 6, following which he slowed dramatically. He shortly returned to garage (not even stopping in pit lane) and retired with 11 laps on the board, his engine ruined.

We started off nicely and I got past Dick. [But] when I was in behind Peter the water temp was starting to come up a little bit, it was up to about a hundred and ten. I thought, "I better just back off a little bit," so I dropped 500 revs, and that's when Dick was catching me. So I thought, "Little bit of a problem here with the water temperature," and then it suddenly went off the clock. Obviously it's split a bore, or blown a head gasket. – Tony Longhurst

That left the Shell cars 2nd and 3rd, Glenn Seton 4th, Miedecke 5th and Richo 6th. Two laps later and the gap from Brock to Johnson was 3.1 seconds, and that despite Brocky visibly driving the nuts off his car – slight brake lock-ups, little wiggles as the applied the power, nothing completely out of control but pushing his luck nevertheless. Some of that was oil dropped by Longhurst (Dick complained his windscreen needed a wash after Tony's blow-up), but some of it was just Peter milking it for all it was worth. Five laps later and the gap was down to 2.0 seconds – a lap later it was back out to 2.3, hinting that Johnson was biding his time, but two laps after that it had see-sawed back down to 1.8, then 1.6. This tug-o-war was only going to end one way.

As a side note, there was also Glenn Seton, who'd lost the top of his gearstick leaving him to change without it! James Hunt had virtually crucified himself trying that at Silverstone, so hopefully Glenn would have an easier day of it. At least he’d made the right choice of Yokohamas this time...

30 minutes into the 50-minute race, Alan Jones stopped for another set of tyres, and with those fitted he went on a rampage. Racing with anyone and everyone, he even managed to unlap himself from Brock and thus get back onto the lead lap – spectacularly, by going around the outside into the Brambles Hairpin.

Tough day for Tony, one car out within 10 minutes, the other irrelevant literally on the starting line.

That, in retrospect, was a moment loaded with significance. With 15 minutes remaining in the race, Peter’s tyres were dying. The gap to Johnson was now 0.8 seconds, and shrinking.

For a moment Brock had breathing space, as both he and Johnson came up to lap Larry Perkins and Johnson was held up for a full lap, but then Dick came roaring back and was right on Peter's bumper along the front straight after the pits. And there into Brambles, something happened. Brocky's rear was suddenly enveloped in a cloud of smoke that rivalled Jonesy's at the start, and the back end was skating all through the Hairpin – so bad in fact that Johnson tapped him in the middle of the turn, leaving him squirming for traction as they departed down the straight. The next time around they were much neater, but there was no hiding that the Mobil Sierra was skating a bit, completely out of grip at the rear. Another touch through Turn 7 was a love tap, no biggie between drivers with this much history together. Another lap and this time Johnson pulled the classic manoeuvre: he got a tow down the long back straight, pulled out of the slipstream onto the inside line, then applied the brake a split-second later than Brock to take the lead by sheer track position. All very chess-like and, because it was Brocky, clean. 44 minutes into a 50-minute race, and Johnson was finally leading.

The interest in the final minutes was provided by Seton trying to find a way past John Bowe. As a Tasmanian Bowe would've loved nothing better than to win in front of his home crowd, but it wasn't going to be this year. Indeed, he had his hands full just keeping the young and future Ford Hero behind him! Some heart-stoppers came when they went three-wide into Brambles while lapping Larry Perkins, and Bowe shortly thereafter had a lock up into Turn 6. All very stirring stuff.

But in truth this race was done. Johnson wound out the final laps to take the win, with Brock a distant 2nd, Bowe a comfortable 3rd, Seton a fighting 4th and Andrew Miedecke a lonely 5th. Colin Bond in the #8 Caltex Sierra made it a Ford 1-2-3-4-5-6. Only then came Amaroo winner Jim Richards as the only works Nissan driver of the weekend. Win Percy, meanwhile, brought the #16 Walky home in 9th place, last man on the lead lap but first of the Commodores, scoring the first-ever points for HRT.

Post-race, with just the TV interviews to get through, Dick told us about what we expected:

Dick Johnson: The main thing that we're really concentrating on is really setting up our car for a distance rather than for one lap. And this sort of proves it, because the last few races we’ve basically had to play the waiting game to a certain extent – it's just like the pursuer and the pursue-ee, you know? But I was really trying, and ol' Pete there... a couple of times I just sort of rubbed bumper bars with him, and he got a bit sideways up the hairpin. But that’s what it's all about, because I'd never intentionally run into anyone, and we got a damn good race!

Channel Seven's Cameron Williams: It seems already that the racing should be closer this year. That has to be good for the championship?

Johnson: Well that’s the name of the game, because I think I’m last in the horsepower race at the moment, to be quite honest!

At this point Brock chipped in, and although his comment was hard to make out over all the other speakers, it sounded like a cheeky, "You don’t wanna swap, do you?" The needle between these two never stopped: in his interview a moment earlier, Brock had extended his congratulations to "George and Graeme Brown and all the boys" rather than Dick himself – Graeme Brown of course being better known as Mort, Brock's old team manager in their Holden Dealer Team days, now managing Dick Johnson Racing instead. Not to be outdone, upon being awarded the victor's ribbon Dick served him one back with one of the subtlest Johnson-isms ever.

Thanks very much indeed. I'd like to congratulate Peter, because he gave us a fairly hard sort of a race. It was a good race; early in the piece Tony was spewing out a fair bit of oil on us, unfortunately he had a problem, otherwise it would've been a three-way dice. Thanks to Shell and to all the other people, and especially Dunlop for our tyres [emphasis mine].

The way Brocky snapped back around, blinked and then flashed a shit-eating grin said the message had got through loud and clear.

All told, after two rounds the ATCC points table had Brock and Bowe equal 1st on 27 points, Jim Richards 3rd on 24, Johnson now 4th on 23. It was shaping up to be an intensely competitive season of tintop racing...